What is your birthday and what time of day were you born? Where were you born?
On September 19, 1978, Jeffery Steven Winget came into the world.1 I asked Grandma Jan for information about my birth, and she couldn’t remember. We decided during our conversation that her lack of memory about the birth of her favorite child probably means that it was uneventful, even if my life wasn’t.
The only memory that Grandma shared about my birth was that it was scheduled two weeks early. I was due on October 1st. However, Grandma was tiny, and there was worry that carrying me to term would be difficult for her. So, I got to come early, and I was a small baby: 6 lbs 6 oz.
Finally, I do know the rest of the specifics from the question. I was born at Cottonwood Hospital in Murray, Utah. Even though I know you will all want to visit the place of my birth, it no longer exists. It was closed in 2007 when the new IHC Hospital was built nearby (Owen was born in that new hospital, btw), and it was torn down in 2009.2
Are there any stories about your birth that were told to you by your parents or other family members?
The most enduring story of my birth isn’t about the delivery itself—which Grandma Jan apparently slept through emotionally—but about the identity crisis that followed.
You see, Grandma and Grandpa were absolutely convinced I was going to be a girl. Since Liza and I were the first “Peacock” babies (Grandma’s side of the family) of our generation, the long-standing pattern of Peacocks birthing boys hadn’t been established. They were so certain of this that they didn’t even bother picking out a boy’s name. Until I shocked the world by arriving as a son, my name was officially going to be “Stephanie.”
I’m sure my life would have been wildly different if that was how things turned out. I’m grateful to be Jeffrey and to be a man. Otherwise, I could never have been your dad.
My parents, on the other hand, were presented with the conundrum of coming up with a name on the fly after my birth, settling on the name “Jeffery Steven.” That, however, isn’t the end of the story.
Teachers have a weird “occupational hazard” when naming children: we can’t use names of students who drove us crazy, and we see and connect with names in all kinds of ways. That year, Grandma had a student named Jeffery in her class—a girl. Not wanting me to have what she then perceived as a “feminine” spelling, she and Grandpa spent nearly a year working to change my legal spelling to the “masculine” version: Jeffrey.
The irony? My name was about as “unique” as a white sedan in a school district parking lot that year. In our local ward alone, there were four of us that were the same age: one “Jeffery,” two “Geoffreys,” and then me—the newly corrected “Jeffrey.”